Mexico: A Novel Part 25

"They were savages," Timoteo said, "and they attacked us."

"They did not!" Antonio thundered.

"Do you believe her?" the soldier demanded. "Rather than your own brother?"

Fray Antonio, realizing that it was unseemly to fight with his brother before an Altomec witness, said calmly, 'There must be no more slaughters, Timoteo."

'They know where the silver is," the sergeant replied ominously. At this, Lady Gray Eyes smiled, causing Timoteo to shout, "Brother, get her out of this city. She's poisoning you."

The extent to which Lady Gray Eyes was influencing the priest was not to become evident for some years, but Timoteo was correct in his estimation of the situation, and he became her avowed enemy as she became his.

For four more years Sergeant Palafox probed the hills for silver and found nothing. Each time he trudged back to the fortress-church his gaunt, stoop-shouldered brother would pace up and down before him as he washed, storming, "While you fail, our family continues in disgrace."

"Brother," Timoteo would reply, "I have looked until I'm weary and there is no silver."

"It's right around us," Antonio would cry in frustration.

"They must be bringing it in from the north," Timoteo reasoned.

"No!" Antonio would shout. "Don't ever say that. It's here, under our feet."

Finally, one day in 1536, after such a scene Timoteo replied quietly, "All right. If it's out there, you find it. I'll guard the fortress." And during most of that year the residents of Toledo saw their thin, scholarly priest astride a donkey riding into the hills looking for a treasure that he was destined never to find.

Upon his return from one such fruitless expedition Fray Antonio was ablaze with an idea that in the long run was to prove even more important in establis.h.i.+ng the fortunes of the Palafox family than the later discovery of silver. He called his brother to his room and while he washed he explained excitedly, 'Timoteo, you must marry a girl from Spain, one with a name so proud that our father's disgrace will be submerged.

You must bring her here, and for a wedding gift we'll pet.i.tion the king for a quarter of a million acres. The land will be legally ours, and one day we'll find the mines."

"It's a good idea," the soldier said, "but I don't know any girls in Spain."

"1 do!" the priest cried, "and she's of such exalted reputation the king will have to grant us the land." Summoning an Indian artist, he directed the man to paint a likeness of Timoteo, which he enclosed in a letter addressed to the marquis of Guadalquivir with a message our family still owns: It seems highly unlikely that a girl as well born and as beautiful as Leticia should still be unmarried, but on the chance that she is, I am writing to request her hand for my brother, Captain Timoteo Palafox. Frankly, esteemed sir, my father was burned as a heretic in Salamanca and there is every reason for you to refuse to ally your n.o.ble family . . .

"Should you mention that?" Timoteo asked. "With the marquis, it may prove the deciding point," Antonio replied, without informing his brother of the marquis's liberal views.

In his impetuous desire to find his brother a proper wife who could enhance the family fortunes, Antonio did not pause to reflect upon the terribly wrong thing he was doing: bringing a woman he had loved to Mexico not for the real reason-that he wanted her to be near him again-but for the ostensible reason that he sought a bride for his brother. He could not foresee the anguish this must bring him.

But having made one daring move, he found courage to make another: He drafted a second letter to the king himself: And so, Sire, in view of the warlike nature of the Altomecs, whose constant incursions threaten Your Majesty's lands, and in view of my constant desire to win these difficult pagans to G.o.d, I humbly beseech that these rebellious areas be made part of the dowry of the marquis of Guadalquivir's daughter, he being the one who served you so gallantly in your fight against the Moors. If this is done, I a.s.sure you that I shall see to it that troops under my control will bring peace, tranquillity and the love of Jesus Christ to this part of your realm.

When this extraordinary letter reached Spain, the king was faced with a dilemma: if he approved of the marriage and the land grant, he ran the risk of infuriating the Dominican leaders of the Inquisition, which had condemned the Palafoxes; but if he denied the pet.i.tion he would be rejecting one of the men he trusted most and upon whom he had relied in the times of decision, the marquis of Guadalquivir. He could not reach a decision until he restudied Fray Antonio's plea, and then he grasped the nub of the problem: 'The priest promises he'll bring new lands under my control and new souls to Jesus Christ. Pet.i.tion granted. Let the marriage and the dowry go forward." In this duplicitous way the Palafox brothers grabbed their first sizable section of land.

The royal decree authorizing the grant reached Toledo long before Leticia arrived, for her departure from Seville was delayed by protests lodged by the parents of the minor n.o.bleman she had married eight years earlier. He had been a handsome young fellow with an important position in the army, but while on service in the king's dominions in the Netherlands he lost his life in a daring sortie against the Protestant armies. Now his parents wanted his widow, Leticia, and her children to remain with them in Spain.

She had startled them by saying boldly: "The children can stay with you. I shall go to Mexico," and not even her father's caution against this rash judgment dissuaded her. Her arrival in Toledo was further delayed by other considerations imposed by her various relatives, but her dowry was delivered according to the king's schedule.

When the lines of deed were to be officially drawn, Fray Antonio dominated the proceedings to ensure that any lands suspected of containing silver fell into the Palafox personal holdings, while those that had already proved barren went to either the Church or the king. By this stratagem Sergeant Palafox gained possession of enormous stretches of promising land around Toledo plus the virtual owners.h.i.+p of some nine thousand Indians, whom he considered as his slaves and treated as such.

One of tt^e first Spaniards in Mexico to be aware of the power to be gained from land and Indians, Timoteo caused six iron brands to be forged in the form of a large letter P, and he carried these to all parts of his new estate, where they were placed in fires until white-hot, after which they were pressed against the right cheeks of all the Altomecs belonging to him. So for two generations men in Toledo could point to the right cheeks of Indians and say with certainty, "That one belongs to Palafox."

It was Lady Gray Eyes who brought this barbarous behavior to Fray Antonio's attention. Dragging a badly scarred peasant woman before the priest, she showed him the distorted face still bloated and discolored from the branding. Antonio, drawing back in horror, asked: "What happened to her?"

"Your brother," Gray Eyes said with obvious revulsion.

"He struck her?"

"Branded her-with a hot iron. Your family initial. That big P."

She spoke calmly and dispa.s.sionately, but there was a sadness in her voice and at one point she observed, "When I lay hidden in the cellar with my son's pregnant wife, waiting for Stranger to be born, we used to study the parchment showing your G.o.ds and pray for their arrival, because they were the gentlest deities we had ever imagined. When I saw how your men killed, I thought, They must have left their G.o.ds in Spain. But then I learned that the people there had burned your father. .. ."

For the first time she told Fray Antonio of how she and the Altomec women had slipped out at night to destroy the Mother G.o.ddess, to whom people had been sacrificed by burning. Looking at him with dark accusing eyes, she cried dolefully, "Six years before you came to this city, we had cleansed ourselves of abominations like the burning of people. Why have you not ended them in Spain?"

Her question was so devastating that Fray Antonio rushed from the room and issued a chain of orders: "Go to the villages. Collect every branding iron with that shameful letter. When you have them all, report to me."

On a day in June he ordered a great fire to be lit and melted all the cruel irons.

In late 1537 the beautiful young widow Leticia de Guadalquivir arrived in Veracruz, whence she made the long upland journey to Toledo, where on a bright sunny morning under a sky that was an impeccable welcoming blue she faced the brothers. At that moment she was more alluring than she had been when Antonio had known her as a self-willed girl in Seville. The years had softened her, made her more of a woman, and the tragedy of her husband's death had given her maturity, but Antonio could see from the imperious manner in which she surveyed her surroundings that she was still determined to be mistress of her own world.

When she moved forward toward the brothers, she went automatically toward Antonio as if to resume their love affair of years ago, but the priest flashed a warning signal with his eyes and an almost imperceptible shake of his head. With a half-smile she turned away from Antonio and moved almost gaily toward Timoteo. "You must be the handsome young man in the painting they sent me," she said, and with the elegant ease she had perfected even as a young girl, she kissed him on the cheek.

That afternoon, with scores of Indians watching and approving, the couple went into the fortress-church, where Fray Antonio was waiting to marry them. I can visualize the three of them as they stood there together on that fateful day, for I often heard about it from my Palafox relatives. My mother-in-law, Dona Isabel, from the Spanish branch, liked to describe the scene: "Four hundred years ago, it seems like only yesterday. Antonio the priest, tall and slim and dark, a solemn man. Palafox, short, rugged, with a grinning countenance, always a soldier. And between them this radiant woman, thirty years old maybe. How tangled their emotions must have been. They say in our family that when the time came for Fray Antonio to recite the marriage ritual he almost fainted, but his brother reached out and steadied him. 'Not here,' the soldier whispered, and the marriage was solemnized." My mother-in-law always ended with that strange word, adding: "What no one noticed at the time was that when Father Antonio ended the marriage ceremony he cried in a firm voice: 'Captain Palafox, you are now wed to Leticia.' He had no right to use that word 'Captain,' for Timoteo had surrendered any claim to an officer's rank, but from that moment on he was Captain to everyone. Just as Timoteo had stolen the Palafox lands, so now Antonio stole the name Captain. We're a bold, clever lot, Norman."

On the night of the wedding Lady Gray Eyes told her granddaughter, who was then seventeen, "These brothers have done an evil thing, Stranger."

"What?" the lissome girl with long braids asked, anxious to learn all she could about the Spaniards.

"The priest has summoned for his brother a girl with whom he was once in love," the wise old woman explained.

"Did he tell you that?"

"Not in words."

"What did you see?"

The moving forward, the drawing away," the queen said, and tears came into her eyes. "These Spaniards make life so hard for themselves. They love a system of G.o.ds they can never sustain. They adhere to principles they can never understand."

"Why doesn't the priest take the girl, if he's the one who loves her?" Stranger asked.

"For a Spaniard that would be too simple," the queen replied. And in the succeeding days they watched.

What I am about to relate does not, of course, appear in the chronicles of either the Spaniards or the Altomecs, but it is very much a part of my family tradition, and I heard it first from my own mother, who was certainly not given to idle chatter. For three years, from 1537 to 1540, Fray Antonio Palafox lived in a kind of h.e.l.l. He was deeply in love with his brother's wife, whom he had known intimately in Seville; yet he himself had officiated at her wedding to his brother and it was with his words that her marriage had been solemnized.

Like King David, he found himself dispatching his general to strange battlefronts, hoping that the enemy would slay him so that Timoteo's wife could revert to him; yet even when the captain was miles from Toledo and Leticia was alone in the fortress-church and obviously eager for the priest to visit her, he could not bring himself to violate his brother's marriage. He would meet Leticia inside the fortress and she would intimate that he would be welcomed in her chambers that night; against his will he would recall the night he had spent with her in the Moorish garden in Seville and he would suffer an agony of desire, but he could never bring himself to approach her room. As soon as Captain Timoteo's horse could be heard whinnying at the fortress gate, the priest would mount his donkey and leave by another exit.

Antonio would go searching for silver, and the Indians of remote areas saw him often in those years, a tall, graying, handsome priest of forty-two. He had once been the most commanding figure among the Spaniards, but he was now irresolute, alone and driven by conflicting desires. On one such trip he camped in Valley-of-the-Dead, hoping that Altomec survivors of his brother's ma.s.sacre might slaughter him in revenge, but the Indians knew him as their friend and fed him. Next day he startled them by lining them up and was.h.i.+ng their feet. Through tears he pleaded for their forgiveness, which they had already granted. Later, when he wandered off into the hills, they kept scouts watching over him, and when news of his unusual behavior reached Toledo, Captain Palafox thought he might have to send his crazy brother back to Spain.

But Lady Gray Eyes had contrary plans, and when word sped through the fortress that the mad priest was returning on his donkey, she ran to the walls and looked down on his forlorn figure. He was gaunt from hunger, and sunken-eyed with confusion. His long legs dragged in the dust, and his donkey was in command. Carefully she watched as he dismounted, went to the refectory for food, and repaired to his quarters for a bath. When he reappeared shaven and once more a priest, she kissed her granddaughter on the forehead and whispered, "Now."

A few minutes later the slim young girl, dressed in her simplest gown of linen and with flowers in the tips of her long braids, went to the chapel where the priest was praying in much confusion of soul and said, "Fray Antonio, I have come to be baptized."

The priest looked up and asked, "Has your grandmother at last given her consent?"

"No," replied the girl demurely. "I am doing this of my own will."

The priest clutched her hands. "Why?" he cried joyously.

"Because last night I heard about how you begged die Indians in Valley-of-the-Dead for their forgiveness."

The priest felt hot tears edging their way into his eyes, for it seemed to him that in a world of moral confusion the Indian convert represented a solid point of reference, one that his mind could cling to. He took her triumphantly to the tunnel that pierced the fortress wall and led to the outdoor chapel, where they stood at last before the baptismal font. Normally, Stranger would have had to wait until an a.s.sembly of several score had been gathered for conversion because Fray Antonio conducted his baptisms with pomp, but the honest joy at winning the queen's granddaughter inspired him to baptize her at once.

When the rite was concluded, Fray Antonio put his hand once more upon the head of the tall girl and said in a kind of exaltation whose source he did not comprehend, "Henceforth you shall no longer be known as Stranger. Your name shall be Maria-of-thc-a.s.sumption." With that he led her back into the narrow tunnel. When they were beside the huge wall that he had constructed, he felt her close behind him and stopped, and perhaps by accident she b.u.mped into him; they embraced, and there was a tremendous meeting of their mutual hunger, and after more than an hour they emerged into the sunlight of Toledo, the city they would govern together for many decades.

When the Palafox brothers were comfortably settled with their women-Timoteo with the daughter of a Spanish n.o.bleman, Antonio with an Altomec princess-they resumed their search for the hidden silver mine with which they hoped to cleanse their father's shame. One day in 1541, Timoteo was returning empty-handed to Toledo and had reached a point within sight of both the pyramid and the fortress. He started going down a hill he had climbed many times and, in so doing, kicked aside a small rock, which revealed another of a type he had not seen previously. Upon examining it closely, he concluded joyfully that it must be silver ore and ran with it to his brother. The two pulverized the rock and finally reduced it to a small lump of silver.

Attempting to mask his excitement, Fray Antonio asked casually, "Where is the mine?"

"It doesn't seem to be a mine," Timoteo replied.

Fray Antonio bit his lip. "But now we'll surely find the mine."

"I looked, but it was not at hand," Timoteo said, and this was the beginning of the real frustration of the Palafoxes. It is true that between the years 1540 and 1550 Timoteo was to uncover several profitable deposits of silver, and it is a matter of record that for the remaining years of his life he was able to send the king in Madrid an annual gift of about twenty thousand duros, which paved the way for his and his brother's advancement in the army and the Church. But the great mother lode of Toledan silver, which the brothers knew had to exist somewhere in the vicinity, eluded him and often in the evenings his brother, now Bishop Palafox, would unroll his maps and ask once more, 'Tell me, Timoteo, have you searched this valley?" Invariably Timoteo had.

In 1544, when it seemed likely that the trivial silver mines so far discovered could be depended upon to producc a steady if limited income, Bishop Palafox began to turn his energies to the third obsession that governed his life. He took his brother to the southern battlements of the fortress-church and pointed to the cactus-ridden wastes that lay beyond what once had been the Altomec City-of-the-Pyramid.

"Down there," the bishop said quietly, "I shall build our new city."

"For a tribe of miserable Indians?" Timoteo asked.

"For the glory of G.o.d," the priest replied. "After us, there will be civilized people in this city, and we shall build structures of such splendor they will forever honor the name of Palafox."

"We've already built this fortress," Timoteo protested.

"Can you see that pile of rocks?' the priest asked.

"Beyond the tree?"

"And the others?"

"I can hardly see them," the soldier replied.

"They form the outline for our Hall of Government," Antonio explained.

"It's too far away to defend from the fort," Timoteo warned.

"By the time it's finished, we won't need the fort," the priest replied.

'These Altomecs will never-"

"Facing the Hall of Government," the priest interrupted, "I plan to lay out a large public plaza. Can you see the rocks over there?"

Timoteo tried but failed to visualize the ambitious plan. "You're playing with empty fields."

"They won't be empty long, because I plan to start building right away, a special building along the entire western side of the plaza. It'll be the glory of our city."

"What kind of building?"

"A cathedral," the priest replied.

"You mean from here ... down to what you call your Hall of Government? You must be insane!"

"When I was in Seville," Antonio replied, "waiting for my s.h.i.+p, I saw their cathedral. Did you bother to see it?"

"I did" Timoteo replied, with some nostalgia.

"When the priests of Seville started that enormous building," Antonio reported, "they announced to their people, 'We are going to build a church so large that all who come after us will cry, "They must have been insane." ' " He paused, then added, "1 am touched by that kind of insanity."

"But a building from here to there. Antonio, where will you get the money?"

The priest turned on the battlement to look at his brother. "Why do you suppose I've driven you so desperately to find the silver?" he asked.

"Our family . . ." the soldier stammered. Then he faced his brother and snapped, "You tell me! Why did you draw the map so that the mines would fall in my land ... and not in the Church's?"

"Because I was determined even then that our family should do the building," the priest replied. "Because I am determined to erase the shame we bear. Do you think I arranged for you to have nine thousand slaves merely for your pleasure? Timoteo, you are going to put those Indians to work not for yourself but for the building of Toledo, so that when you and I are dead, men will say, 'This is the city of the Palafoxes, who served G.o.d.' "

In 1544 the real building of Toledo began. The Hall of Government was finished in that year, after which Fray Antonio slipped the viceroy such an enormous bribe in silver that the official was willing to overlook Professor Palafox's condemnation and appoint his son Timoteo, who had been demoted by Captain Cortes, to the rank of governor of the vast Toledo district. At Timoteo's invest.i.ture, his brother whispered: "The cleansing of our family name has begun."

The s.p.a.cious central plaza was now laid out according to Fray Antonio's plan, and in 1549 the first public band concert was held there, given by Altomec musicians trained by Antonio. The construction of the vast cathedral was begun but made no conspicuous headway, for during the first fifty years its corners seemed so ridiculously far apart that the casual observer could scarcely believe that they were all intended for the same edifice. Roads were built; small churches proliferated; the House of Tile rose toward the end of the bishop's life; wherever Antonio moved, buildings seemed to spring up, and they were of such beauty that later historians often speculated as to how this ascetic priest had acquired his flawless sense of design. A French professor of architecture said of him, "From the original fortress-church to the House of Tile we can follow the orderly progress of a master builder. Bishop Palafox took an Indian city and transformed it into a jewel of Spanish architecture, yet always, in all he did, he showed respect for Indian building traditions. Toledo is a monument to his solid yet exquisite taste in combining the two cultures."

Antonio was supported in his desire to build by Maria, who said: "My ancestors were insatiable builders, too. I think all great people must be. They suffer some kind of urge to leave the face of the earth different from what it was when they arrived." And in later years, when the huge government and ecclesiastic buildings were completed, she said, "We have built for the governor and for the priests and for G.o.d. Now I want us to build a small, pretty building for my Indians."

And it was she who kept applying moral pressure on the bishop until he agreed to build a convent in which young Indian women could dedicate themselves to the Church and elderly ones find a last home. But, like Antonio, she could not think small, and when the convent was finished it stretched along the entire eastern boundary of the plaza, and flourished there until 1865, when Emperor Maximilian had it converted into his Imperial Theater. During these years of building, Maria never forgot her grandmother's admonition: "You must seek and find the kind of man who is capable of the love that has marked your family, and if you find him, cling to him forever, more even than you-cling to your family, or your G.o.d, or your country." She became one of those many flawless wives that the Mexican Indians gave their Spanish conquerors, and from her union with the priest sprang multifold blessings, just as the union of Mexico and Spain produced far more that was beneficial than damaging.

Fray Antonio and Maria had four children, who launched the Mexican half of the Palafox clan, and one of their three sons became a brilliant churchman who, in time, found his own Indian girl to help him in the task of running the ecclesiastical half of Toledo. It was largely because of the stability that Maria brought Fray Antonio that he ultimately overcame the shame his family had suffered in Spain and won the t.i.tle of Bishop Palafox in the New World. His gnawing desire for his brother's wife was easily dissipated when he compared her unsteady, nagging ways with the serenity and helpfulness of his own Indian wife, and before a decade had pa.s.sed he felt sorry for his brother and almost censured himself for having engineered such an unfortunate marriage.

Antonio never legally married Maria; there was no convention by which he could have done so, nor was she ever known as his wife. She was simply Dona Maria, the most gracious of all the women in Toledo. When dignitaries arrived from Mexico City to talk business with the bishop, they could spend three days in argument and never see the stately Indian woman; but once the business was concluded, Bishop Palafox would bring forth his Altomec princess with the introduction "This is Dona Maria," and from the subtle manner in which she took control it was apparent that in the fortress part of that fortress-church she was mistress.

It was she who organized the final baptism of all Altomecs, except her grandmother, who resisted until her death. The old woman was buried near the grave of her father, General Tezozomoc, and gained immortality in the religious festival that occurred each year on the anniversary of the day when she had marched out of the city with Dona Maria, bearing a parchment portrait of the Virgin Mary and her Son.

But, most of all, Dona Maria brought a kind of balance into the life of Bishop Palafox. She showed him how ridiculous it was to avenge a father by trying to find more and more silver, especially when the father had given his life trying to prove that silver must be treated in sensible ways; and if the first Palafox brothers found redemption in Mexico, it was not because they discovered silver deposits but because they fitted themselves solidly into the community and made their part of Mexico a haven of law, religion and good government.

During the sunny years that Dona Maria spent with the bishop, no Indians were killed in the high valley, and although it is true that those belonging to Captain Timoteo were slaves, they were nevertheless protected by the Church and an ultimate escape from their slavery was provided for.

In 1580, at the age of eighty-two, Bishop Palafox died as happy a man as one could have found in Mexico. One of the reasons why he was able to die in peace was that he had accomplished his various missions: he had wiped the stain of dishonor from his family name; he had pacified the Altomecs and converted them; he had established the city of Toledo and adorned its central plaza with n.o.ble buildings. Just before he died, having finished the House of Tile, held to be his architectural masterpiece, Bishop Palafox was planning a new series of buildings and had even talked of constructing a Roman-type aqueduct across some half-dozen miles of hills and valleys so as to bring fresh water into the city. When he died, the walls of the cathedral were twenty feet high. If he had failed to find the mother lode, he and Timoteo had discovered lesser deposits that enabled them to provide their king with riches. But what gave him the greatest consolation was that he knew his work would be carried forward by the surviving members of his well-entrenched family.

A son of Captain Palafox naturally succeeded to the governors.h.i.+p upon the death of his father, thus establis.h.i.+ng a precedent that made the Hall of Government practically a Palafox inheritance. In the same manner, a youngster whom the bishop had sired with Maria was about to be ordained a priest and was obviously destined to become the second Bishop Palafox. To support such men, Captain Timoteo's initial grant of a quarter of a million acres had been enlarged by one means or another to a third of a million and would shortly double itself.

At her husband's death Dona Maria started her own important work. In her upstairs room at the House of Tile she looked out over the city her bishop had built and she began to reflect upon the strange relations.h.i.+p that had developed between the Spaniards and the Indians. Dona Maria developed the idea that the greatness of Mexico would be secured by the continued union of Spaniard and Indian, and that if anything conspired against it, the nation would suffer. She was therefore inspired to record the history of her people, and it was this work that became so influential in the development of Mexico, for it gave substance to the claim that at the time of the conquest the Indians were already civilized.

In the many books I have read on the subject, historians have been harsh in evaluating the claim of Spain that it colonized the New World, and particularly Mexico, in order to win souls for G.o.d, and the so-called unholy alliance of priest and soldier has often been ridiculed, especially by Protestant writers like my father, who heaped a good deal of scorn upon the Spanish rationalization. But I have studied the records of the Palafox family in an effort to determine exactly how the original brothers operated and what they did with their energies and their silver. Let me admit up front that, yes, Timoteo the hotheaded soldier did brand his Indians, whom he considered his slaves, and, yes, he did direct that ma.s.sacre of the Altomecs, but in each instance he was condemned by his brother, and in repentance he helped not only to build the new city of Toledo but also to finance its major buildings about the plaza.

How exactly did the brothers spend their income from the small mines? Of every hundred ounces of silver that Timoteo dug out of the Toledo hills, records I have seen proved that about sixty went directiy to the king of Spain to support his Catholic opposition to infidel England; and the great armada that came so close to subduing England could not have sailed if the silver of Mexico had not reached Madrid. Of the remaining portion, thirty of the ounces went to the Bishop Palafox for the building of Toledo and for the subjugation of the surrounding Altomecs, and the last ten ounces were kept by the Palafox brothers, sometimes illegally, to purify their family's reputation.